Opinion

James Holmes preliminary hearing: Aurora cop recalls, "There was so much blood"

Aurora police Officer Justin Grizzle stood at the exit door to theater 9. A trail of blood ran along the concrete. A trail of people burst from the door toward him, their screams for help ringing in his ears. And behind him, in a patrol car, sat the man accused of causing the chaos. Moments earlier, when Grizzle asked a handcuffed James Holmes whether there was anyone else with him, Holmes smiled.

"Like a smirk," Grizzle testified Monday at the first day of the preliminary hearing in the murder case against Holmes.

Grizzle pulled his gun, stepped over the semiautomatic rifle that the shooter had left lying beside the door and walked inside.

"I slipped," he said. "I almost fell down because of all the blood there."

Grizzle's testimony and that of other Aurora officers who arrived at the theater early July 20 provided emotional gravity Monday to a hearing with a simple purpose: Prosecutors hope to show there is enough evidence against Holmes for him to stand trial on 166 counts of murder, attempted murder and other crimes for the shootings at the Century Aurora 16 movie theater.

That is why, in painfully detailed testimony, prosecutors walked detectives through descriptions of where the victims were shot, where the deceased were found and what wounds they suffered. Officers for the first time publicly recounted what they witnessed.

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Once inside the theater that morning, tear gas singed Grizzle's eyes and throat. An alarm blared. A strobe light flashed. Cellphones beeped. The movie — "The Dark Knight Rises," the latest Batman film — continued to roll.

Grizzle could see bodies lying motionless. Another officer who testified Monday, Sgt. Gerald Jonsgaard, recalled seeing frightened patrons cowering in the first two rows of the theater.

Communicating through shouts over the noise inside, the officers quickly developed a system for helping victims.

Get them out of the theater. If they could talk, send them a few yards away from the theater exit to await treatment. If they couldn't, lay them by the door and get them to help immediately.

Ambulances couldn't move through the tangled parking lot. Many were held at a staging area. For Grizzle and other officers, getting victims to the hospital meant using their patrol cars.

Grizzle said he didn't hesitate.

"After what I saw in the theater," he said Monday. "After the horrific ..."

In the courtroom, Grizzle's voice choked up.

"I didn't want anyone else to die."

On his first trip to the hospital, Grizzle took two people. In his back seat was Ashley Moser, bleeding from gunshot wounds to her torso. In his passenger seat was a man whose name he never learned.

Back inside the theater, an officer approached Jonsgaard, carrying the body of 6-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan.

Jonsgaard felt the little girl's neck, hoping for a pulse. There was none. She was rushed to a hospital anyway.

Once at the hospital, Grizzle gave his victims to waiting staffers. Then he turned around.

On his next trip to the hospital, Grizzle carried two more victims in his patrol car. On the third, it was a man with a gunshot wound to his head.

The man, Caleb Medley, was breathing, but just barely, Grizzle said.

"It was the most god-awful sound," Grizzle testified.

It was when the sound faded, though, that Grizzle became most worried. He could sense the life slipping from the man in his back seat.

"Don't you (expletive) die on me!" Grizzle said he would yell back at Medley when he could no longer hear him breathing. "Don't you (expletive) die on me!"

When he was done yelling, Grizzle said, that terrible sound, to his relief, would return.

Grizzle took Medley to the University of Colorado hospital, where doctors saved his life. Grizzle didn't stop to find that out, though. He went back to the theater, where one more victim — so covered in blood that Grizzle couldn't tell whether the person was young or old, man or woman — awaited.

By dawn, pools of blood gathered on his floorboards and seat cushions. There was blood on his car's ceiling, on its dashboard, on its headrests.

"There was so much blood," Grizzle testified Monday, "I could hear it sloshing in the back of my car."

Just getting their cars to the rear of the theater to pick up victims was a challenge, many officers testified Monday.

When the call went out for officers to help take victims to the hospital, Officer Aaron Blue sprinted to his patrol car. He negotiated a zigzag course through the theater's parking lot, around wounded victims and fleeing witnesses and over two curbs until fellow officers placed a young woman with gunshot wounds in her head and legs into his car.

Blue sat with her in the back seat while another officer drove.

"Every time she moved," Blue said Monday, "she stopped breathing."

And so Blue delicately held her, trying to keep her alive.

Jessica Ghawi died at the hospital.

Outside the courtroom Monday morning, several officers — including Grizzle — hung around after their testimony. On breaks, when shooting victims and their family members came outside, the officers would smile at them. And the victims, more often than not, extended their hands for a handshake or opened their arms wide for a hug.

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